The Fiscal Control Board, politicians and students have to pause in their race to destroy the University of Puerto Rico (UPR).

The different sectors that lead the current conflict over the cuts in the UPR may think that their positions are antagonistic, but the reality is that the dynamics they have unleashed lead to the same thing: the destruction of the UPR. Some out of confused love, others out of laziness, and some out of voluntary blindness.A public system of higher education, affordable and of quality is vital for any modern society and that is 10 times truer when we are talking about a society as Puerto Rico, in constant crisis and with an economy in freefall.There is no future for a country without a public institution in which its young people have the opportunity to train professionally and intellectually to contribute to collective development. But there is also no future for a public institution that does not modernize, does not become more efficient and does not adapt to the needs of the country.The Fiscal Control Board and governor Ricardo Roselló

have established a level of budget cuts for the UPR without transparency on how that number was established and without reasoning about which type of public institution of higher education we are going to have if the cuts are made. They have lacked the clarity and vision that was needed to convince people about the need for those budget cuts.The Governor has also been negligent in keeping vacant the positions of the university's Board of Governors. It is an inexcusable abandonment of duty that speaks more than all of his media tricks on this subject.The political class, be them politicians from different stripes, as well as labor unions and civil organizations from all over the political spectrum, are like bad weed in the garden of the project that is the UPR. And they are so to the extent that they do not work to improve the institution, but rather work to manipulate what happens in the institution for the advancement of their small and often individualistic goals. It is not possible to pretend that the UPR is the battlefield where all the complexities of the country are disputed. We have long stretched the political boundaries of what is, and must be, an institution like the UPR.The students that proposes closure and strike have also failed. They have failed because the country needs them to be more intelligent and shrewd than the Board and more than politicians, but what has happened, without intention we believe, is that they have become accomplices of the plan. Students who close gates, vandalize and spit at professors are the internal ingredient without which the otside plan could not be completed.We propose a stop in the race to destroy the UPR.The Board should postpone the discussion of the Fiscal Plan of the UPR until June 30. The UPR should not be first in line of budget sacrifices. Therefore, further adjustments can be sought in other areas before finally defining the sacrifice at UPR,

and it must be taken into account that the UPR has already suffered cuts due to the effect of the budget formula and that the university should also be a protagonist of the economic development purpose that the PROMESA Law imposes on the Board.The Governor must fill the vacancies of the Governing Board and the new members should have as priority to help the UPR in a period of redefinition and transformation that can not be postponed.The students and the university community must keep the UPR open and operating to demonstrate that the value of the institution is in that annual wave of human beings who leave their gates ready to make a better country with the most complete training and a solid commitment.At the same time, students, teachers, government and Board must make good of their promise to have dialogue and sit down to have a discussion, without absolutist or unfounded positions, about what type of higuer education institution the country needs for its development, and then, which are the sacrifices that are going to be asked of the University.At stake is Puerto Rico's greatest tool of social transformation in its history… you have to be willing to rethink everything.